(1) Field of the Invention
The present invention is directed to a method to efficiently identify, monitor and track commercial ships that traverse local and international waterways. In particular, the present invention is directed to a method of acquiring non-real time existing information about individual commercial ships from dispersed external data sources and then processing and displaying the information graphically on an electronic display such as a computer monitor.
(2) Description of the Prior Art
There is a recognized need in the United States to share data and information between various government, civilian and industrial organizations for the purposes of providing for Anti-Terrorism/Force Protection/Homeland Security (AT/FP/HLS). One aspect of AT/FP/HLS pertains to the sharing of data and information on maritime activities. U.S. naval and maritime assets are vulnerable to terrorist attack throughout the world. In addition, the U.S. homeland is vulnerable because of its approximately 95,000 miles of coastline and via its approximately 361 ports, especially those ports related to commerce through merchant shipping.
There are a significant number of commercial ships that are constantly traversing global waterways, on the order of tens of thousands. Many of these ships could present a potential threat to U.S. security at the hands of terrorists. Presently there is no efficient method of identifying and tracking these ships to monitor their activities and determine potential threats. Consequently, most of these ships continue to ply the waterways “off the radar” of U.S. scrutiny.
Existing information sources from various government, civilian and industrial organizations such as government agencies like the Department of Defense (the Office of Naval Intelligence) and the Coast Guard (the Automated Identification System) and private insurance companies (Lloyd's of London), can provide identity, location and other data for individual commercial ships. These diverse information sources are independently organized in a large number of disparate locations. Existing capabilities to collect, aggregate, align and analyze data across the wide spectrum of information sources are manual, labor-intensive, time-consuming, error-prone and do not provide a meaningful visual perspective.
Prior art systems do not encompass the global scale that is necessary to accomplish the AT/FP/HLS goals. For example U.S. Pat. No. 6,249,241 to Jordan et al. describes a marine vessel tracking system that is directed to a specific harbor. The system collects data from a single data source, namely harbor radar. It fails to consider other data regarding any vessel type from any geospatial data source at any geospatial location, not just a specific harbor radar system.
What is needed is a method to efficiently acquire the aforementioned identity, location and other types of data and then align, aggregate, correlate and visualize the data all through computer-automated means, in a timely fashion providing a global as well as local display of commercial shipping activity with the capacity of highlighting individual ships of interest that could pose a threat of potential terrorism.